Our history

IPI is the brainchild of scientist and entrepreneur Timothy A. Springer, Ph.D., a professor at Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital.

In 1977, Springer was a postdoc in the laboratory of famed Nobel Laureate César Milstein, known for his development of monoclonal antibodies as a disruptive protein technology. Springer deployed monoclonal antibodies in his research, paving the way for antibodies therapies for autoimmune diseases, and later founded nine companies based on his research, including the biotech Moderna.

Tapping this entrepreneurial spirit and recognizing the limits of a for-profit company, Springer joined forces with Harvard Medical School professor Andrew Kruse in 2017 to launch IPI.

Together, they recognized a central problem in biological research and designed a nonprofit enterprise to fill an unmet, pressing need.

Antibodies make up nearly half of all drugs on the market. But despite their promise, they still face major hurdles.

Traditionally, investigators produce antibodies by injecting mice or other lab animals with a specific target protein. However, this system of polyclonal antibody production has fundamental limitations. If an antigen is highly conserved, or nearly identical, between species, an animal’s T cells will not recognize it as a foreign organism. In this case, no immune response is triggered and no antibodies are generated, rendering the target intractable.

Additionally, antibodies and antibody reagents sold on the market often fail to provide reliable results. This reproducibility crisis interferes with pivotal antibody-based research and impedes progress in protein science and therapeutic development.

Facing this dearth of high-quality, well-characterized antibodies, Springer teamed up with co-founder Andrew Kruse, a Harvard-based expert on G protein-coupled receptors and synthetic antibodies, who developed yeast display technology as a novel way to generate epitope-specific monoclonal antibodies.

The two consulted with stakeholders from all sectors and determined that their goal of generating synthetic, recombinant antibodies against human extracellular and secreted proteins, particularly those that are difficult to make or target, would be best met as a nonprofit research institute. The result was IPI, launched in 2017 in the heart of Boston’s biological research nexus.